The Almost Archer Sisters (19 page)

The ride into the city was languorous, except for Kate’s constant narrative.

“… one of the safest big cities on the planet. I swear in the like decade I’ve lived here, I’ve never been mugged, raped, shot, nothing—did Beth tell you I went to NYU, not Parsons? Beth is such a fuck-up. But we’ll talk about that. I studied film. Not that I wanted to
make
films. That’s the Chrysler Building. See the top? I never did really see myself as a director. Always liked the industry side. I’m interested in the producing. The financing side. I’m interested in the notion of the
perfect
pitch …”

The driver let me crank open a window to smoke, his Middle Eastern music adding a tinny soundtrack to our bumpy trip to Manhattan. I always knew I was in the States by the state of its roads. When Beau used to drive us to pick up Beth at the airport, I could close my eyes and feel us transition from Canadian-smooth streets, the cracks practically grouted with ground-up tax money, to the bombed-out downtown Detroit roads, its buckled concrete and neglected potholes rattling my teeth and bones.

“… so I said, ‘Beth, that’s pretty unforgivable. No, completely unforgivable. But we’ll talk about that.’ I used to live over there. I mean, I know she’s made mistakes in the past—beating up a bouncer
comes to mind—ha-ha-ha—you know we always tease Beth that she’s burned so many bridges in New York she should have a ferry named after her—that’s the Lower East Side. Marcus lives here. He was a really nice guy. ‘Beth,’ I said, ‘your sister’s husband? I mean, that’s just fucking mean. But we’ll talk about that …’”

It was shortly after the abortion when Beth got the idea to move to New York. She went through a phase of watching
Bill Kennedy at the Movies
with Lou. Beth loved Myrna Loy, but her favorite actress was Jennifer Jones, especially in
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
. After a sorry revelation about her husband’s bastard son, Jennifer Jones frantically runs into their Connecticut yard. Gregory Peck wrestles her writhing body to the ground like an apologetic monster. Jennifer pretends to calm down, then she suddenly drives off in the family sedan, shooting down the gravel road, laying tracks like one long exclamation point.

To no one in particular, Beth announced, “I can’t wait to live in New York, where I don’t have to
drive
every time I want to leave.”

“… You will LOVE, love, love, the shopping on the Lower East Side, Peachy. I
am
getting that
fucking
kimono. Hope you have space in your bag for some new purses. They’re knockoffs. It’s all grey-market. No worries. But I have mentioned to Beth about her drinking. We all have. Marcus said the bouncer should have been a wake-up call. How cool would a kimono be? Saw it off a little? At the thigh maybe? With jeans? Yessss …”

Of course Beth lived here, I thought, scanning the skyline, almost dental in its craggy symmetry. I had memorized Beth’s address from all the Christmas and birthday cards I’d sent, sometimes stuffed with a five or a ten, Canadian, just to bug her. And Easter cards, and Halloween cards, and Thanksgiving (Canadian too) cards, and all the in-between cards filled with news of the boys, or just corny cards I’d send to woo her with their corniness.

When we crossed the bridge, I felt the vertigo of the city suddenly tipping forward, and I couldn’t take everything in with just two eyes.
I saw stores I’d never heard of and some I had; bloated Gaps next to tiny cafés, elderly brick houses slumped next to a stiff concrete slab, with a slash of a window cut in the center. Was it a salon? A museum? There’d be a tree, then many, then none for an entire block; dark, light, dark, light, the shadows carrying specific weight, the sun some real heat. We drove slowly, then quickly, the cab moving in nauseating fits and starts. The hordes of pedestrians, like cattle, seemed to have no interest in the yellow and red lights, or fear of the cars barely honoring them. Our driver parted people, Red Sea–like, around the hood of our nudging cab. Some buildings looked like they could be large homes or small colleges. It was like watching a noisy musical playing inches from my face. We barreled down canyon after canyon, some streets narrow and some harrowingly wide. My neck hurt from gawking and craning, up then down; it was Detroit times a thousand; Belle River, a thousand million. It wasn’t a bad feeling, just overwhelming, the same feeling I’d get as an eight-year-old with five dollars in my pocket pulling up to the Starlite. I wanted to feel flush with choices and happy to make them. But instead I’d worry about buying the wrong thing, something I didn’t want or wouldn’t like, and a bit of that fear followed me to New York.

“Here we are,” Kate said, clambering out of the cab.

Beth’s condo was in an old building made newer by bright green awning, smoked windows, and two huge granite vases framing the doorway.

Kate pulled out an envelope of money and counted out the fare, handing me the rest.

“Beth wants me to give this to you. She was going to pay for the whole weekend anyway, so no arguments, okay?”

“But I have money. I just have to hit a bank—”

“We’ve seen your people’s money. It’s very pretty, but very useless here,” she said. “Now, I’ll call you later, okay? I have a million things to do, but I’m taking you to a dinner party tonight and tomorrow night I was thinking we could—”

“
No!
No. I mean, I’ll be fine, Kate. You don’t have to babysit me.”

I wasn’t sure how much she knew of my participation in their Marcus fraud, or of my threat to meet the hapless man tomorrow night, instead of standing him up as Beth had planned for “Georgia” to do. But I didn’t want her to muck that up. Plus, the thought of spending another living minute with Kate made even my hair hurt.

“Well. Okay,” she said, fiddling with the bottom of her shirt and glancing around. “But I have explicit instructions not to—”

“Look. I am sorry, but I’m here on a break. I have a lot to figure out and I didn’t plan on having an escort. It was very generous of you to meet me at the airport. Very. But I am fine from here on, okay?”

Beth didn’t have friends, she had minions, pets, errand runners, I thought, as Kate handed my bag to a man who looked like he belonged to a South American army.

“I can take my own bag,” I said, snatching it from his hands.

“Okay then,” the man said, surrendering his hands to the sky.

“It’s Jonathan, Peachy,” Kate said, yanking my bag out of my hand. “Jonathan works here. He’s Beth’s doorman.”

“I’m
Beth’s
doorman?”

Jonathan took a step back and scratched his chin. “
Really?
Now, I was always under the impression that I also worked for some of the other nice people who live here, too. But perhaps I’ve been wrong all this time. And where is Miss Archer, may I ask?”

“She got
delayed
,” Kate said, looking at me. “This is her sister, Peachy. She’ll be staying here for the weekend. So you be good to her, okay, Jonathan? It’s her first time in New York.”

We were practically yelling at each other over the traffic sounds.

“Of course,” he said, raising his hand. For a second I thought he was going to slap Kate across the face. Then a cab screeched to a halt in front of the building.

“Thanks, doll,” Kate said in his general direction. She folded herself inside the cab. “It’s going to be a great dinner party tonight. It’s in your honor.”

I silently followed Jonathan and my bag into the lobby, which was flooded with the sound of a loud golf game echoing out from behind the marble kiosk. Jonathan dropped my bag and dove over the counter.

“Let me turn that down. That’s not your sister’s favorite sound.”

“That’s funny,” I said, looking around, “Beth loves TV. She makes TV.”

I couldn’t imagine entering this lobby after a long, stressful day and uttering “Home at last.” It had all the charm and warmth of an empty underground pool.

“Well, your sister was one of the few ‘no’ votes on me getting the thing. I try to keep it low. I can’t see the resemblance,” he said, turning back around to look at me. “Between you and Beth.”

“We’re only half-sisters,” I said, thinking he could probably tell which half’s mine.

“You got a key and all that then?”

“Yes, thanks. I do. I’ll take that.”

He picked up my bag off the floor and handed it to me as though it was carved out of expensive leather and not formed of blue vinyl and covered in the boys’ Pokemon stickers.

“Let me know if you need anything. Peachy. Is that from the South or something?”

“Kind of. No. It’s Georgia. Peachy’s just a nickname.”

The elevator was taking a long time, and I seemed to need to flood the lobby with my words while I waited.

“Well, it’s my middle name,” I said. “But I was, you know, conceived in Georgia. Born in Canada. Where we lived, Beth and me. But
I
live in Canada, Beth doesn’t live there anymore. She lives here. As you know.”

“Oh. I thought Beth was from California. I know she has a
weekend
house near Grosse Pointe. But I thought—” He suddenly stopped himself as though remembering that he had to do something urgent behind the kiosk.

“A
weekend
house? Huh. In Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Yes. Well, Beth was
born
in California. But she lived most of her life on our farm. Since she was two. In Canada, in Belle River, which is across the
lake
from Grosse Pointe, Michigan. I guess that might be where her
weekend
house is located. But I’ve never been there myself.”

I put my bag down, took a step toward him, and crossed my arms. An elevator came and went while I continued.

“No, see, Beth’s at the farm where she was raised, and where I live, weekends
and
weekdays. With my sons and my husband and my dad. She’s never mentioned that?”

“Nope,” he said, shaking his head, still pretending to look for something. “So Beth’s
Canadian
?”

“Not anymore. But she was. Yeah.”

“Huh.”

It was like we were both blindfolded and describing the same animal to each other.

“So this weekend house,” he said. “Big stone place? Few hundred acres? You live there too, with your family?”

“Yes. We
all
live there. Only it’s thirty acres now. The land got chopped up to pay for Beth’s college. And we’re likely going to chop it up some more. And the only thing stoned about the place is my husband, sometimes. Beth visits us every other month or so, and my dad does her hair for free. He’s a hairdresser. She’s never mentioned that?”

“No. She once mentioned something about him being a fighter pilot in Vietnam.”

It wasn’t until after I replied, “No, he’s about as opposite to a fighter pilot that you can get,” that it occurred to me Beth might
have been talking about Tooey, her real father, who now sported phony pilot credentials.

“So Beth’s delayed on the farm you live on with
your
family. Getting her hair done by her dad the hairdresser.”

“That’s right. She’s also taking my son to his doctor’s appointment, and after that she’s supposed to drag four loads of my laundry into town because our washer is busted.”

That image, of Beth doing laundry, seemed to amuse Jonathan. But after a brief silence our words, which had begun to bounce around the marble cavern, started banging violently into each other.

“I’m sorry. You know it’s none of my business—” he said.

“That’s okay. This is all—”

“It was unprofessional of me to—”

“No, no, no, it’s okay—”

“Please don’t mention to Beth that I—”

“Of course not—”

“I mean really, it’s—”

“I won’t—”

“I need this job,” he said, pressing his finger lightly on the kiosk and stopping the conversation on that point.

There was restless history between them, that much was obvious. And though he was not bad-looking, I think even Beth would draw the line at her elderly black doorman.

“Do you live here?” I asked.

“Yes, I do.”

“What floor?”

“I don’t live
here
here,” he laughed. “No, I live in Yonkers. My wife and I. Our son’s in college. Syracuse.”

By then his face had melted into complete bemusement, eyebrows fully relaxed alongside his eyes.

“You should know that Beth and I aren’t much for conversation these days, I’m sure she’s mentioned that.”

“No, she hasn’t,” I said. “But then again, we’re not much for conversation these days either.”

I re-pressed the elevator button, feeling suddenly exhausted by Beth even though she was hundreds of miles away. It occurred to me that this man saw Beth morning, noon, and night. And before she dumped her dramas on me over the phone, she likely lugged them past this man who likely made minimum wage and maybe Christmas tips, and still was able to put a kid through college, a man who probably commuted from wherever Yonkers was, probably at least an hour away, every day, to and from SoHo, so he could stand guard for people like Beth, a woman who never, ever dropped her guard for anyone, except for maybe me.

“Okay then, I’m going up now,” I said as the next car arrived.

“You do that, Peachy.”

I held the door open for a second.

“You do realize, Jonathan, that my sister is completely and utterly full of shit.”

“I have had my suspicions, Peachy,” he said, spreading a sympathetic smile across his face.

I pressed the
CLOSE
button. “Twelfth floor, right?”

“That is right. Now you let me know if you need
any
thing.”

“Oh, I will.”

B
Y OUR FARMHOUSE
standards, the apartment was surprisingly small, but by Manhattan standards I knew Beth had scored with this place. It was nicely proportioned, boxy and clean. In the living room, which was a step down from the narrow hallway entrance, there were two intentionally mismatched dark wood end tables bracketing a white couch that I could only call obese. It seemed a piece of furniture so alien in color and texture to me that when I sat on it I had the nervous-visiting-mother-of-brats kind of dread, as though my kids could dirty up this kind of couch telepathically, through my own proxy fingers.